by Isabel Goyer

A Hong Kong business journal has reported that Cessna is in preliminary talks with Chinese conglomerate AVIC on the subject of a joint venture between the firms to build and distribute business aircraft in mainland China. The story in the South China Morning Post quotes Cessna’s Trevor Esling as confirming that the talks are preliminary. […]

Diamond Aircraft, which a few months ago laid off a large number of its North America workforce, is cutting back some more. Citing the continued slow market for piston airplanes and its recent financial woes, Diamond Aircraft says that it has made the difficult decision to cancel its plans to attend the three most important […]

The lure of a jet is strong. Not only are they fast and high-flying but they’re undeniably cool. Who wouldn’t want to take that next step and lose the props? Truth is, a lot of pilots out there have the money to move up to the jet world but just don’t do it, and the […]

I was reviewing last week’s spate of accidents and ran into another handful that fall clearly in the category of VFR accidents that would not have happened had the pilot been operating under instrument flight rules. A couple of these accidents happened when the pilot flew into power lines while en route, something that, obviously, […]

Last week President Obama touched off a new series of high-level flame wars with aviation industry leaders by calling for new taxes on bizjet owners while at the same time seeming again to call into question the legitimacy of bizjet use. In remarks during a press conference on June 29, the president focused on the […]

A rocket carrying a dummy achieved a successful launch last month from a platform in the Baltic Sea. The craft, created by Danish group Copenhagen Suborbital over the course of the last few years, was aiming for an altitude of around 50,000 feet for the launch; it is not yet clear what altitude the HEAT […]

Senator James Inhofe (R.- Okla.) introduced legislation on Wednesday mandating changes to the FAA’s enforcement process to make it “more fair to pilots” who are often left in the dark as to what they are being investigated for and the nature of the evidence against them. ** ** Last year Inhofe had an enforcement action […]

The NTSB’s top 10 list of wanted improvements this year prominently includes the poor safety record of general aviation. ** ** “The United States has not had a fatal large commercial aviation accident since February 2009,” said the NTSB in a release highlighting its concerns over GA safety. “Each year,” the release stated, “hundreds of […]

The aircraft owner and pilot who only two days earlier had a BRS whole-airplane recovery parachute system installed in his Cessna 182 survived the crash of his Skylane into tall trees in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on Wednesday, when he deployed the chute system. According to BRS, the company that manufactured the system, the owner was […]

(July 2011) On Feb. 12, 2009, A Bombardier Q400 (a modernized Dash 8) operated by Colgan Air crashed near Buffalo, New York, claiming the lives of 50 people. In the intervening years the fallout from the disaster has had a sweeping impact on aviation regulation in the United States, arguably more than any other accident […]